Memorial Day Weekend and Fredericksburg

Continuing with our tour of Texas, on Memorial Day we headed to Fredericksburg, TX. We actually drove through the town when we moved here last year. LAST YEAR. Wow, can you believe it's been that long already?! But at that point in time, we were 22 hours out and one hour in from Austin and all we wanted was TO BE THERE.
So it was time to head back and check out the town.
Founded by German immigrants the streets are full of little German eateries and cute shops. It's not the most kid-friendly place and looking back on these pictures now....the day ended up being pretty fun. But overall, it was one of those comedy-of-errors kind of outings. I won't bore you with all the details but everything was just slightly off.

First we wandered the main street and peeked in the cute shops.
We immediately found the toy store. Lucy took one look at this wall and could have stayed for another hour. Each animal was talked to, organized, given plastic trees to eat, and special places to sleep.
When it was time to go, she sadly parted ways with her mini Serengeti.
We walked the streets again,
got cool stickers,
saw interesting people. Now that's a nice look. Gym shorts and boots, on a hot summer day. Mmm.
I loved the all the shop signs:
Especially these two colorful ones:
Then we spent the next 1/2 hour trying to figure out where we should eat.
We finally settled on this cute diner and it was perfect; food, cold drinks, and new army toys for the kids to play with (purchased at that local toy store). Brilliant entertainment!
After lunch we found a darling pie shoppe:
We were actually stuffed from lunch so we didn't eat any. But I enjoyed the cottage vibe.
Since the first two hours of our outing were filled with boring Mom and Dad stuff, we told the kids that after lunch we'd go swimming at the local pool. The bait that kept them going all morning long! So with two excited kids, we drove over to the pool only to find out that it was CLOSED! What??? Who keeps a pool closed on Memorial Day? Isn't the day all about friends, BBQs, and water activities? Booo. So then we searched for two other pools in the area, drove to each of them, and.....they were closed too. Poor Lucy. She was pretty sad and didn't understand why she couldn't go in the beautiful blue water right in front of her.

So, we got some candy at a shop on main street (which improved the morale) and headed out of town to see if we could find a lake or some water area that was OPEN.
We passed beautiful fields and flowers.
Stumbled upon the:
saw this in the Sonic parking lot:
and eventually.....we found water!!! Off the side of the road, somewhere outside of Fredericksburg was a small stream with a little bridge and tons of small fish jumping up the wall.
Ahhh, the oasis of our day. We couldn't have been happier. The kids played for an hour and then, we headed home.
Nice to meet you again Fredericksburg. You're probably a bit more fun without kids and we wish your pool had been open. But we hear you have excellent peaches so we'll spread the good word about you!